- She sells seashells by the seashore.
Red leather, yellow leather.
Unique New York, New York unique.
She stood up on the balcony,
rubber baby buggy bumpers.
[overlapping speech]
I am a mother pheasant plucker.
I pluck mother pheasants.
I am the most pleasant mother pheasant plucker
that ever plucked a mother pheasant.
Okay, so we all know that tongue twisters are really fun
and that they're fun because they're hard
and they make you mess up.
- A box of bis, biscuit box.
- Truly rule-y. [laughs]
- Proper cough copper coffee pot. [laughs]
- But why are they hard?
Today I'm gonna walk you through why some tongue twisters
are more difficult than others.
[upbeat music]
So one of the things that we forget sometimes
is that speech sounds are physical actions.
Let's look at an ultrasound image
of how many cans can a canner can
if a canner can can cans?
- [Man] How many cans can a canner can
if a canner can can cans?
- So here's a diagram of the inside of your vocal tract.
This is called a midsagittal section
and it's gonna let us show, really clearly,
what some of these actions are.
If we wanna make a speech sound like a p,
like a puh, right?
We're gonna close the lips here,
the air is coming up through the vocal tract,
and it gets stopped, and then air pressure builds up
until it explodes out in a puh.
And you can feel that, if you try it yourself.
Puh.
[upbeat music]
Try this.
A Box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits,
and a biscuit mixer.
Try that three times fast.
- Box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits,
and a biscuit mixer.
- A box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits,
and a biscuit mixer.
- A box of biscks, a box of missed biscuits,
and a biscuit mixer.
- A box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits,
and a biscuit miss, mixer.
- A box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits,
and a biscuit vixer.
[groans]
- We've got these same two consonant sounds,
but we keep swapping the order, right?
Make a kuh sound.
Kuh.
Here what's happening is that you're bringing
the back of your tongue up to seal off the oral cavity
right there at the roof of your mouth.
So, just like with puh, right,
the air is getting stopped, some pressure's building up,
and then we're releasing it forward, kuh.
If I were to make a [hisses] sound, like a long s sound,
I'm gonna bring part of my tongue,
usually for most of us anyway, it's gonna
be you're tongue tip, I'm gonna bring my tongue tip
up towards this gum ridge here.
Then the air's gonna have to fight
to get past this narrow little obstruction
that I've made here.
[hisses]
And the sound is coming from the turbulence
of the air trying to get past that obstruction.
Now say the English word box.
So the back of your tongue has to be up here
for the kuh and then it has to come down
and the front part of the tongue has
to come up real quick as to flip up
for the [hisses].
Box.
Has to happen really fast.
But so far, so good.
We do that all the time, no problem.
Box on its own, no problem, box, box, box.
Biscuit on its own, no problem, biscuit, biscuit, biscuit.
We can do that all day long.
A box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits,
and a biscuit mixer.
We keep swapping the order.
Ks, sk, ks, ks, sk, sk, ks.
That's what makes it hard.
- A box of biscuits, a box of mixed bisk,
biscuits, and a biscuit mixer.
- A box of biscuits, a box of mix bix-is.
- And a base, bis-quit mixer.
- Box of bis, biscuit box, a box of biscuits. [sighs]
- A box of biscuits, a box of mixed biscuits,
and a mi, biscuit mixer.
- So there's been some cool research into tongue twisters
where they put people in brain imaging machines
and have them do tongue twisters
to try to study the way planning works in speech.
And one of the things that they've been able
to confirm is that speech sounds are organized
in the brain according to the physical actions
and where they take place in the vocal tract.
So, there are tongue twisters that tend to make us mess up
in similar consonant sounds
and tongue twisters that tend
to make us mess up vowel sounds.
[upbeat music]
Let's talk about the immortal tongue twister toy boat.
Go ahead and try it first, three times fast.
Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.
- All right, this one's easier.
Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.
- Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.
- 10 times fast?
- Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat,
toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.
- To help explain this one,
I'm gonna pull up a quadrilateral.
You may have seen me bring up the vowel space
in a previous video.
So basically, a person facing to the left,
like this, with a cross section.
The front of the mouth is over here,
back of the mouth is over here.
It's a map of the inside of your mouth
and it lets us be really precise
about the exact shape and position
of the tongue inside the mouth for a given vowel sound.
So both of these vowel sounds in the words toy and boat,
in most accents of English, they're diphthongs.
They start in one spot and they move to another.
So we can draw them on the vowel chart.
In my accent, oi starts way back here,
oh, and moves forwards and up, ee.
So the whole thing goes oh, ee.
It's a big old journey.
Oh is a much smaller journey,
but it is kinda similar in that it also starts
way in the back, oh,
and then it's gonna move up and forwards, oo.
Obviously this comes in a million different flavors,
different accents, let's just stick with mine for now.
Oh.
Now you see how these are parallel?
They have a very similar movement pattern.
The lips, however, are starting from very rounded,
in oh, ee.
And then going unrounded.
And they're doing the opposite of that in oh,
in that vowel in boat.
They're starting off not very rounded
and they're moving into lip rounding.
Oh.
So it's a coordination problem again.
You're moving your tongue in a really similar way,
from back to front and up a little for both of them,
but you're having to move your lips in opposition to that.
Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat,
so you very quickly get confused.
- Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.
- Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat,
toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.
- I mention, by the way, that the oh vowel sound,
what we call the goat vowel,
has a lot of different varieties
in different accents of English.
If we were to take a kind of an Estuary English accent,
for instance, and I had a vowel sound something like oh.
- Boat.
- That's gonna look like this.
It's gonna start back here, a little lower,
oh, and it moves more than mine did,
and it moves, but it still moves up and forward.
It's still moving up and forward in that general direction
and moving from less lip rounding to more lip rounding.
And same is true, even more broadly true,
from further back to further front,
if I'm, say, doing a broad Australian accent, oh.
- Toy boat.
- Here are some more people doing toy boat.
- Toy boat, toy boat, toy bite, toy bite,
toy boat, toy boat.
- Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.
- Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat. [laughs]
[upbeat music]
- Some tongue twisters are gonna be harder
for native speakers of some accents than others.
Let's take the fast thief flash-fried thick fish.
- The fast thief flash-fried thick fish,
the fast thief flash-fried thick fish,
the fast thief flash-fried thick fish.
- The flat, fast thief flashed fried thick fish.
- The fast thief fashed, flash fly, thick fish.
- This has got f, which is a labiodental sound,
lip and teeth, and th sounds,
so the tongue tip coming to the back of the front teeth
or maybe even in between the teeth like that.
[hisses]
Thick.
- The fast thief flash-fried thick fish.
- So if we're gonna alternate back and forth between them,
then we have to go the fast thief
flash-fried thick fish.
Now, if you're a speaker of an accent
that fronts th sounds, meaning instead
of using your tongue tip and the teeth,
you use something more to the front of the vocal tract,
like your lip going to your teeth like this.
So, a word like thief, you'd be inclined to use f, thief.
- Thief. - Thief.
- That, too, is going to be a tricky coordination exercise.
- The fast thief flash-fried thick fish.
[stumbling]
- The fast thief flash-fried thick fish.
The fast thief flash-fried fish fick. [laughs]
[upbeat music]
- Next tongue twister.
Truly rural, purely plural.
Well, this is gonna be hard for just about anybody.
- Truly rural, pue-ly plural,
truly rure-ly. [laughs]
- Truly rural, purely plural,
truly rural, purely plural.
- Truly rural, purely [stammers].
- But it's probably gonna be harder
for Americans than it is for other non-North American
speakers of English.
- Truly rural, purely plural.
- Truly rural, purely plural, oh my gosh.
That's hard to do.
- One reason, of course, is that there's
just an extra r in it, if you're a non-rhotic speaker,
then purely doesn't have an r sound in it at all.
- Truly rural, purely plural.
- If you're a rhotic speaker, purely it's got
one extra r, that's on extra r to mess up on.
- Truly rural, plurely plural. [grumbles]
- The other reason, though, is that American molar r,
r, is particularly weird.
I've talked about it before.
The weirdest thing is that the sides of the tongue
are sort of coming up.
You can imagine kind of, if I'm a tongue,
and I'm raising my shoulders, the sides of those tongue
will come up and they'll make contact
with the upper teeth, the molars and the bicuspids
on either side.
You can have a really strong version of that
where they come all the way up inside
and even press out against the sides of the upper teeth.
Here's an ultrasound of someone making an American molar r.
- [Man] Round and round the rugged rocks,
the ragged rascal ran.
- Now, this is exacerbated because Americans
also tend to use a lot of back of tongue bunching
on l sounds, so that's the back
of the tongue coming up and back like this,
but again kinda squishing back into itself maybe
in a sort of a similar way to the way
it's doing with r up in here.
- Truly rural, purely, purely plural. [laughs]
[upbeat music] [typing]
- So here's a silly sentence that I just wrote.
Bossy Tommy Shaw often called on lots
of tall, honest law officers and constables
to do all kinds of awful, horrible, profitless jobs.
- Bossy Tommy Shaw often called on lots of tall,
honest law officers and constables.
- To do all kinds of awful, horrible, profitless jobs.
- So that's not necessarily a tongue twister
for me, an American.
There are a few shades of different vowels in there,
but it's not necessarily gonna trip me up.
But this is gonna be a nightmare
for a Brit, an Australian, a South African,
basically any non-North American who's trying
to do an American accent because there are pattern shifts
all over the place.
The patterns of the vowels are different.
- Bossy Tommy Shaw often called
on lots of tall, honest law officers-
- Often called on lots of tall, honest law officers
and constables-
- To do all kind of awful, horrible, profitless jobs.
- For me, the vowel sounds in bossy.
- Bossy. - Bossy.
- Bossy.
- And Tommy.
- Tommy. - Tommy.
- Tommy.
- Are close, but they're not the same.
- Bossy Tommy.
- Whereas if I'm say, an RP speaker,
bossy, Tommy, they're both gonna be about here.
- Bossy Tommy.
- Conversely, the sound in, for me, Shaw
and often are the same.
They're right about here.
- Shaw often.
- Whereas, if I'm a Brit, then that might be Shaw
and often, they're different.
- Shaw often.
- So that's really gonna make your brain explode.
So I wrote this sentence as practice
for coordinating difficult vowel sounds
in an American accent for actors who aren't Americans.
- Bossy Tommy Shaw often called on lots of tall,
honest law off, law, law?
[upbeat music] [typing]
- Okay, next tongue twister.
If you're an American, try this in your best RP.
All I want is a proper cup of coffee
made from a proper copper coffee pot.
Tin coffee pots and iron coffee pots,
they're no use to me.
If I can't have a proper cup of coffee made
from a proper copper coffee pot,
I'd rather have a cup of tea.
- All I want is a proper cup of coffee
made from a proper cough, copper coffee pot. [laughs].
- Tin coffee pots and iron coffee pots,
they're no use to me.
- If I can't have a proper cup of coffee made
from a proper copper coffee pot,
I'd rather have a cup of tea. [laughs]
Oh my god.
For me, all uses a vowel sound up here
and coffee uses pretty much that same vowel sound.
Whereas proper and pot are gonna
use a vowel sound down here.
They're close, but they're not the same.
We have a different pattern, though, in RP.
So oo is gonna be up here,
whereas coffee, proper, and pot are all gonna be down here.
So it's pattern shifts that make that one
really devilshly tricky, but also really good practice.
- All. - All.
- All.
- Proper. - Proper.
- Proper.
- Coffee. - Coffee.
- Coffee.
- Pot. - Pot.
- Pot.
[upbeat music]
- In 2013, some researchers at MIT came up
with what they claimed was the hardest tongue twister
in the English language.
And this tongue twister was so hard
that apparently none of the test subjects
could even get through it.
The tongue twister is as follows.
Pad kid poured curd pulled cod.
- Pad kid poured curd pulled cod.
Pad kid poured curd pulled cod.
- Pad kid poured curd pulled cod.
Pad kid poured curd pulled cod.
What does that mean?
- Pad kid poured purd cold pod.
- Pad kid poured purd, curd pulled cod.
- Pad kid poured curd poured cold.
Cold, cod.
- So let's look at the first and last consonants
of each word first.
Each word ends in a duh sound,
which is a tongue tip sound, like this.
And they alternate, they go back and forth
their beginning consonants between puh,
for the lips, and kuh, for the back of the tongue.
So we have a lip sound, puh,
a tip of the tongue sound, duh,
and a back of the tongue sounds, kuh.
And they're all stops, they're all the same kind
of obstruction of air flow.
If we say them all together, but just the consonant sounds
that begin and end each word,
we get puhd, kuhd, puhd, kuhd, puhd, kuhd.
For even pattern, puhd, kuhd, puhd, kuhd, puhd, kuhd.
Let's look at the vowel sounds now.
So these go a,
eh,
or,
er,
oh,
ah.
We're kinda goin' all over the whole vowel space here.
They're all different, we're not repeating any of them.
So maybe that's what's hard about it
is that we're going back to the same pattern
over and over and over again
with the consonants, puhd, kuhd, puhd, kuhd, puhd, kuhd.
Whereas we're varying each of the vowels
and we never come back to the same one.
So the combination of similar, different
could trip you up, I guess.
Try it for yourself, see what you think.
- Pad kid pulled cod pulled cod.
- Pad kid poured curled curd pulled cod.
- Pad kid pulled cord poured cod.
Pad kid per cod per kid. [laughs]
- Pad kid poured curd poured pull cod.
Pad kid poured- [laughs]
[stammers]
- I've said it before, speech is one
of the most physically complex things
we do as a human being.
And of course it's physically complex
and it's complex in terms of brain planning
and coordination.
So that's the intersection that makes tongue twisters
so fascinating and difficult and fun.
Next time you do some tongue twisters,
maybe just pay attention to what those physical actions are
and, if you wanna try to pattern them,
you can pattern the physical actions after each other
and get better and better at coordinating them.
[upbeat music]